Articles Archive for November 2016

Full text of the bill is linked here. Note pages 17-18 and 44-45. They provide for city contributions to the Municipal and Laborers’ pensions to more than double over the next five years and thereafter to a whatever-it-takes ARC-like amount. And if the city fails to make those contributions the pensions can force the Illinois Comptroller to deduct what’s due out of payments that flow from the state to the city. In other words, contributions will go up to whatever is necessary to pay the pensions and other city needs …

Donald Trump continues to agonize over how much pain he can cause with his cabinet appointments and whom he plans to hurt the most. It’s clear from his nominee for Secretary of Education, billionaire Betsy DeVos, that he is for privatizing public education–and dismembering or eliminating teachers unions.
One weird call was picking neurosurgeon Ben Carson for Housing and Urban Development, who recently admitted he has no earthly idea how to run a government bureaucracy. Carson’s only credential is that he was raised in a house in a city. I was …

From Reuters
The one-of-its-kind, bill-payment program seeks to avert the nightmare scenario for a state in the worst financial shape in the country: a shutdown of essential services such as employee health insurance, a disruption of prison food supplies or mothballing of state trooper cars in need of fuel and maintenance.
But it comes at a heavy cost with unlimited late-payment fees now approaching 20 percent in some cases for Illinois’ cash-strapped government, whose general obligation (GO) low-investment grade credit ratings are the lowest among U.S. states.